


you're here

by leoperidot



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Implied post-traumatic stress, Nightmares, POV Sokka (Avatar), Sokka (Avatar) Needs a Hug, Sokka (Avatar)-centric, Sokka gets a hug, i love them, they're good siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:21:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27747421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoperidot/pseuds/leoperidot
Summary: He wakes up coughing, his healing ribs stabbing with pain every time he manages to choke in or eke out a breath. His face is dripping wet. Why is his face wet?“Sorry,” comes Katara’s voice again, and she bends the water away.Sokka gets nightmares. One night, Katara's there.
Relationships: Katara & Sokka (Avatar)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 73





	you're here

He’s flat on his back and he can’t breathe. 

Flames lick at his arms, his shoulders, his cheeks—the heat, the _heat_ , like the air itself’s on fire. His leg’s sending up pulses of hot, sharp, gritted-teeth pain and every time he tries to breathe his back screams in harmony. His shoulder, too, his every muscle stretching, pulling, praying, the weight in one hand just one hand just _one_ hand and he calls, “Hang on,” like she can hear him, and he risks craning his neck to see her and—

Katara.

Katara, and she’s—he grips harder, harder harder tighter please don’t slip, Katara, don’t— 

“Sokka?”

Distantly, he hears her. He has to hold on tighter, hold on hold on hold on—

“Sokka, come on.”

He’s trying, he’s trying so hard—

*

He wakes up coughing, his healing ribs stabbing with pain every time he manages to choke in or eke out a breath. His face is dripping wet. Why is his face wet?

“Sorry,” comes Katara’s voice again, and she bends the water away. 

“You’re here,” he says without really meaning to. And then he coughs.

It doesn’t usually end like this.

Usually, it ends with seeing them—it’s Toph and Katara with equal frequency, Suki and Aang and even Zuko sometimes, Yue once or twice. (The worst night was when it was his mother’s voice calling out for him, and a faceless, broken, bloodied body hanging from his hand.)

Or it ends when they slip from his fingers and fall into the endless flame. 

“I’m sorry,” Katara says again, her voice small. “I didn’t want to—”

She looks so scared.

He’s holding her hand, he realizes. So tightly he can feel her pulse and his pulse thumping in time. Both too fast.

“You kept calling my name,” she says.

Sokka’s throat tightens around the words _I’m sorry_.

When he loosens his grip on her, his fingers seize into a claw. The ache is familiar.

Twin crescents are gashed, red and shiny, into the back of her hand.

He watches her blood bead to the surface and wants to throw up. Breathes jaggedly. It hurts his back. His throat is too tight to get any words out. Least of all— 

“I’m okay,” she says. “It’s okay,” to an apology she didn’t receive, and his heart twists. She bends a little globe of water over the two blood moons and they’re gone as quickly as they arrived. Which somehow just makes him feel worse.

Sokka kicks away the furs he’s tangled in—he’s suddenly too hot for them and they don’t smell like home anyway, they smell like humidity and mildew because nothing is right in the Fire Nation—and struggles into a halfway-upright position. Gives up sitting up because—because. 

“What were you dreaming about?”

 _Flames_ , he can’t say. _The orange sky. You, hanging over them, and only me_ —Sokka tangles his seizing fingers in a fur and holds hard. He tries to drag a breath into his lungs but it still fucking _hurts_ to breathe and how spirits-damned pathetic is that, that two entire months later he’s still struggling to carry out the most basic of functions— 

He screws his eyes shut tight and tries to do that measured breathing nonsense Iroh coached him in that one time. Said it was normal. Said it happened to Zuko. Said he wasn’t going to die, no matter how much he felt like it. Said _in,_ two, three, four, hold, two, three, four, _out,_ two, three, four, five.

It works. Some cruel little piece of him hates that it works, but it does.

He pushes himself into a more upright position, straightens his back and presses it against the wall to relieve a little of the ache in his ribs. The metal is disconcertingly cool.

He opens his eyes again and Katara is still there.

“I’m okay.” 

She still looks terrified—eyes wide, hands pressed over her mouth—so he opens his trembling arms wide for a hug.

Katara clambers into his bunk and curls up with her arms around him, careful of the spots where she knows, from fruitless water healing sessions, that his ribs are fractured. She nestles her head on his chest like she’s listening for his heartbeat.

“You kept calling my name,” she says again.

Sokka swallows hard. “Sorry,” he tries, his voice breaking.

“Don’t apologize,” she says quickly, sharply, and she sounds like—He still remembers their mom’s voice. No matter how much he’s forgotten of her. He tightens his hold on Katara. “I just mean—I—I didn’t know what to do.”

She sounds like she’s going to cry, and he feels like it, but they don’t break. Neither of them. Maybe they should.

Katara sits up slowly. He doesn’t really want to let go, and neither does she. She teeters on the edge of speaking before saying, “I should go get Dad.”

“No.” The word’s out of Sokka’s mouth before he even realizes he has an opinion.

Katara hesitates, her brow furrowed slightly.

“He doesn’t need to—” _See me like this._ “I’m—” _Too old to cry for my dad after a nightmare._ Sokka chews on the inside of his cheek, and finally comes up with, “He’s sleeping. Let him rest.”

She doesn’t look like she likes Sokka’s excuse, but she doesn’t push him on it, acquiescing to leaning her head on his good shoulder and not saying a word. He puts his arm around her in quiet gratitude.

The cabin of a Fire Navy ship isn’t a pleasant place to sleep. Regardless of the fact that Zuko decommissioned it from combat, and that it’s populated almost entirely by freed Water Tribesmen, that the only people on the ship from the Fire Nation military are Zuko himself, a few of his personal guard, and a number of medics and doctors who are working in tandem with the water healers of the North. Regardless of the little whale-oil lamp Katara put on the table between their bunks because she doesn’t trust the dark, and the way the rich scent of burning whale oil smells like a little, tiny bit of home. 

None of that can change the dark, oppressive metal _everything_ , hard-edged even in shadow. Or the flame symbol that recurs everywhere, or the fact that ships that looked like these stole so many people from the Southern Water Tribe. 

“Do you get nightmares a lot?” asks Katara.

“Um.” Sokka swallows hard. “Kind of.”

She looks up at him with her best protective-little-sister glare.

“A lot,” Sokka amends. “Kind of a lot.” Kind of like every night. Which he doesn’t say, but he thinks Katara hears it anyway.

She snuggles closer, wraps her arms around him. “So that’s why you don’t—”

Most nights, back in the palace, hardly anyone slept alone. Aang and Katara, at the very least (nothing gross, he’s _twelve_ , they just couldn’t stand to be alone). Toph would join them most of the time. Even Suki, when she wasn’t on duty, and Zuko, although he could usually be found with Mai and Ty Lee a little ways away.

Sokka tried, once. Early on, when Zuko was still under strict order of bed rest from Katara’s Healer Voice. They were all in Zuko’s huge Fire-Lord-y bed, Zuko resting his head on Sokka’s shoulder, Sokka’s arm thrown over Suki, whose head was on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. Aang and Katara on Zuko’s other side, curled up like two question marks or two halves of a heart. Toph diagonally across Zuko’s legs.

Sokka took hours to get to sleep, and once he did, he wasn’t asleep for very long.

The worst part was how they all _looked_ at him, with all that worry in their faces— 

“So it wasn’t just that once.” Katara’s voice is breaking, which makes Sokka’s heart shatter. “Sokka—”

“I’m okay,” he says quickly. “Don’t worry about me.”

Katara fixes him with a Look. 

He sighs.

“You’re not a very good liar,” she tells him matter-of-factly.

“I know,” he says.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Sokka sucks in a breath. “I don’t know.” Which is the truth. 

“Will you tell me next time?”

“If I don’t wake you up,” he says, which is trying to be a joke but it isn’t, it really isn’t. “Sorry. About that.”

“I wasn’t really asleep anyway.”

He hmms. “I don’t want to go back to sleep.” He never does, after.

“Me neither.”

Sokka breathes out. He keeps holding his sister. 

Tomorrow at breakfast, their dad will ask, with too much concern lining his forehead, why they look so tired, and they’ll shrug and he’ll nod like he understands because he probably does. Tomorrow, Katara will go to the infirmary and stick close to Yugoda’s side again, and Sokka will find Toklo or Panuk or someone else to bother, someone who won’t ask him questions. Tomorrow, they’ll keep sailing for home.

For now, he sits in a bunk in a decommissioned Fire Navy ship and he holds his sister.

**Author's Note:**

> i just love these siblings so much <3
> 
> find me on the tunglr @katarahairloopies


End file.
